Monday night's game at Candlestick is the last for the 49ers there, and I know there will be lots of opportunities for future team glory in Santa Clara. So I'm not going to shed any tears over their past or their future. For myself, it's a whole other story.

It's over. I'll never again play in front of a huge crowd at a sporting arena. In a not-that-well-known chapter of my past life, I played at Candlestick. On German-American Day at the ballpark, on an evening that lingers in my memory, I played the orchestra bells (glockenspiel) in the Deutscher Musikverein. (This is a community band founded in the United States in 1938, and no, I wasn't an original member.)

We marched out onto the field, and I believe we started with a polka. We usually started with a polka. But it was when we played "The Star-Spangled Banner" that the crowd rose as one. There I was, pretty much right on second base, and I was banging the heck out of those bells.

This "banging" as a description of musical technique might not be a compliment if employed to describe a performance by oh, Emanuel Ax or even Lang Lang. But the sturdy technique did guarantee that even if the other musicians were blowing and tootling as hard as they could, you could hear the bells over the noise - I mean music.

Did we meet the challenge of playing against the echo? Never mind. The sound waves have long since wafted away. What remains is a photograph of the occasion - I'm in the foreground, Giants scoreboard behind - on my dining room wall. It's a conversation starter almost every time new guests dig in to dinner ("is that you?").

I hope to get to the new venue someday. But I am a little wistful that I probably won't be part of the Levi's Stadium musical experience. Fans may be relieved.

P.S.: A 1997 column, written when the push was on for the downtown stadium, defended Candlestick. You can read it at www.bit.ly/1dpoYxs.

Boate was near the side door of the Palace Hotel when the actress, in evening clothes, was slipping out of a fundraiser. The two women nearly collided, and "when I raised my hand to pat her on the arm, she turned and said, 'Don't touch me!' It's the kind of thing you don't forget."

-- Gary Meyernotes that the new Coen brothers movie, "Inside Llewyn Davis," pays homage to the late Mel Novikoff, who owned the Surf, the Castro, the Clay and the Lumiere and championed foreign films, art films and indies. Early on, Novikoff committed to showing "Blood Simple," said Meyer, and showed the Coens "how a true showman could help make a movie a success." A character in the movie modeled on the real-life Moe Asch of Folkways Records is named Mel Novikoff. This was much mentioned when the movie was shown at the Telluride Film Festival, where Novikoff was a regular.

Her goal is "to support the common sense innovations and interventions required to help students remain in school, continue their education and achieve their dreams." And she's convinced that CCSF will remain accredited.

-- And Ted Hope, executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, sent out a group e-mail to mark his last week there. Hope mentioned that during his tenure, there were "some great events and guests ... new alliances ... many new sponsors, donations and grants, including two new documentary grants, a strategic planning grant and an operations grant. We made our existing exhibition programs more efficient and profitable. Personally, I think we rocked."

Public Eavesdropping

"Do you realize Santa is such a jerk to Rudolph? He lets him get picked on, and then uses his deformity when it's convenient."